- From: Stephanos Piperoglou <spip@hol.gr>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jul 1997 22:08:34 +0300 (EET DST)
- To: jptxs <jptxs@idt.net>
- cc: Scott Matthewman <scottm@danielson.co.uk>, IDSamson@beauty.hsrc.ac.za, www-html@w3.org, Steven Champeon <schampeo@hesketh.com>
On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, jptxs wrote:
> one of the wonders of HTML [3.2 and down] is it's intuative simplicity. to
> make something bold, enclose it in B's. this makes sense to even those who
> have trouble using the simplest features of their own computer. that is
> why all of the [addmittedly annoying] homepages have cropped up by the
> millions. to shut out all the people who code HTML because they read about
> how to do it on the web one day and found it was easy would be a real
> shame, and would definitely take a good deal of the world-wide out of the
> web.
Wrong, downright wrong.
Most people today publish using editors. Some of the worse editors, as well,
like Netscape Composer in the Communicator suite, that still uses multiple
<UL>'s to indent elements, to say the least.
A good spec, even if it's too complicated for the average lay publisher,
will be good for authoring tools, who can now have ALL the features that
publishers want, while maintaining consistency. Now graphical user agents can
present the content consistently, while other types of UA's can render it
meaningfully. All that, of course, until XML, which will at last help us
find our peace.
> maybe i'm misunderstanding here, and all those old documents will be safe
> so long as they refer to older DTD's and the like, but i don't think so.
You are misunderstanding, actually. Anybody who builds a browser that
understands strict HTML 4.0 can simply have an extra bit of code that
translates older HTML elements into new alternatives in HTML or CSS. Just
build your browser from the bottom up to work in that way internally; read
the HTML, build an object tree, include objects where they exist, render
according to the style sheet, and set up interactivity according to the
scripting language and the hyperlinks in the document. It's a very simple
procedure, at least as a programmer I see it so. I've seen much more
difficult things done.
--
Stephanos "Pippis" Piperoglou - http://users.hol.gr/~spip/index.html
All I wanted in my life was a little love and a lot of money. In that order.
[ Failure is a crime. Defeat; an atrocity! ]
...oof porothika
Received on Friday, 11 July 1997 15:10:33 UTC